Advances in technology such as computer and communication systems have transformed many important aspects of human and computer interactions. For example, voice answering systems now provide a convenient manner for a user to electronically capture a message and forward it to another. With technology advancements such as wireless and Internet systems, electronic messaging systems have become much more sophisticated. For example, these systems can further implement e-mail, text messaging, instant messaging, pagers, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and the like, wherein information can be readily sent and retrieved synchronously.
Moreover, computing devices can be readily accessed to share information during user conferences, such as through a social network, Blogs, or through on-line meetings, and the like. This information can include collaboration goals, interests, photos, and typically any type of data a user desires to share. Similarly, organizations can retain information relating to employees, organizational hierarchies, job titles and descriptions, as well as information relating to day-to-day activities of employees, projects, competitors and the like.
Accordingly, whenever employees are spread out over large working space such as on campus of several buildings, meeting scheduling can become an important aspect of corporate profitability, to ensure the timeliness of projects and associated corporate missions, for example. Moreover, scheduling meetings electronically includes inviting recipients and reserving a conference room, among other things. Nonetheless, inefficient scheduling for meetings often occurs in today's work environments. For example, where meetings are a daily occurrence for many employees, often some employees may not be able to fully access remote meeting due to incompatibility of their communication mediums. Furthermore, frequent changes to the meeting agenda such as changes to: attendee list, subject matter, related documents, and the like can further complicate these conferences.
Typically to competently administer meetings, substantial amount of time need to be spent for preparation and planning to produce efficient results. Moreover, such meetings can fail to be productive due to other factors, such as scenarios when participants do not know each other and may be hesitant to participate or readily offer related documents or other information, as there exists little or no familiarity between participants. In particular, such problems can be exacerbated when one or more participants are remote from the meeting place (e.g., meeting is conducted as a teleconference.) In many of such instances, the meeting is typically not as productive as expected, since the required information is not readily located and available for sharing between participants.
Moreover, meetings are expected to enable participants to achieve common goals, while mitigating the amount of planning time, regardless of the attendees' physical location and end point device employed for communication with other participants. In addition, meetings are expected to function as more than merely isolated events, and instead should strive to form an integrated segment of an overall collaborative framework or organizational goal. Furthermore, attendees should readily have access to the most accurate, up-to-date information in order to assist participants perform at a high level of efficiency.
Furthermore, conference participants may employ different forms of connections that support disparate types of data and media types. For example, with the advances in storage and computing power of portable wireless computing devices, users now are capable of interacting with many types of disparate data types such as images, video clips, audio data, and textual data, for example. In particular, users may employ a plurality of devices with which to connect to the session. For example, one user can participate by audio/video from a conference room, another by voice via a desktop computer, and yet another by text input and through a cell phone. Such disparate media capabilities can increase the complexities involved for supplying efficient conferences.